Monday, July 14, 2014

S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity

This title offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes
in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a radical challenge to the
accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on
Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the
canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality
been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the
idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For despite a
lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment
studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement
that formed the ''intellectual solvent'' of the eighteenth century. The
central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the
traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of
Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has
become entrenched.